Review Summary: The Ukrainian take on Tesseract's sound. Much like a bootleg DVD, it's not far off.
When Dan Tompkins stepped in to replace Abisola Obasanya in Tesseract's vocals position, a lot of criticism came the band's way. The heavy sound of their demo lightened considerably to mesh more with Tompkins's more clean-focused vocal style, and, though the melodic bits may have improved significantly over time, the part of their sound which was quintessentially unique to the budding djent sound all but disappeared.
Enter Joncofy, a group from Kiev whose 2011 release,
Rorschach Inkblots, bridges the two paths of Tesseract into one, while adding in variations and new tricks, such as the vocoder passage in the title track ala Paul Masvidal of Cynic. Joncofy begin the album with an extremely heavy introduction - punishing, death-metal blast beats and the low, down-tuned polyrhythmic chug riffs Tesseract has since done away with, complementing the sound with blood-curdling death metal growls. The sound here is entirely transitory, however, with this weight of this introduction brushed away by oddly-named vocalist Math_max's transition from guttural growls to more hardcore-inspired chant-screaming and a soaring, clean style that easily matches (if not exceeds) that of Tesseract counterpart, Tompkins.
But the similarities don't end there. While the down-tuned polyrhythms are more scaled up in
Rorschach Inkblots, the album loads up on long, melodic atmospheric breaks laden with those soaring vocal melodies, too. Unsurprisingly, it has an effect similar to that found in Tesseract's sound - creating soundscapes and conjuring images of windswept deserts through incorporation of drawn out harmonics, stretched notes laden with reverb, and clean, melodic soloing layered carefully over rhythms varying from war marches to lullabies.
In truth, what may be both Joncofy's greatest asset may also be their greatest faltering point, being that there really is very little other than the aforementioned points to differentiate them from Tesseract at all. Much like the Fates Warning of old and Iron Maiden, this is hero worship plain and simple. But what do you say to hero worship done right?
You say per
fect. While Joncofy have already taken a bit of a spin on the Tesseract sound with a wider vocal range, heavier instrumental sections, and a light yet industrial tone to a few solos which certainly defy the tone set by their British predecessors, there's plenty they can do in order to differentiate themselves from the better-known UK band. For instance, further modifying their tone, playing with different song structures, and continuing to work those smooth vocal transitions from harsh to clean into an even stronger musical propellant could easily help Joncofy surge ahead in the race. And, without a doubt, that's what this will certainly shape up to be between these two similar sounding bands.
But hey, who said that's a bad thing? Surely, a little competition might make things interesting for both bands.
